The Billy Bob Tapes

by Billy Bob Thornton

I didn’t see Billy for years after I went away to college. When I finished my master’s, I came back to Malvern, where I worked on a novel and tried to figure out what to do next, and Billy and I reestablished contact. He no longer looked like Ernie Douglas. He had a beard, tattoos, and hair down to his shoulders. He sang and played drums in a rock band, while working a series of crummy factory and construction jobs. Like me, Billy had large ambitions. I wanted to be the next Vladimir Nabokov. He wanted to be the next Elvis Presley.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Dear Billy Bob

  “Maybe tomorrow” is the mantra for me

  Even though I know it’s just a fantasy.

  But somethin’ ’bout hopin’ keeps us healthier

  Bankin’ on your dreams can make you wealthier I hear.

  —“Somewhere Down the Road”

  (Thornton/Andrew)

  THERE WAS A COUNTRY DUO IN THE FIFTIES AND SIXTIES FROM HOT Springs, Arkansas, called the Wilburn Brothers. I always loved them. Their act used to be the whole Wilburn family, but later it became just Teddy and Doyle. They looked just alike—all the Wilburns looked alike—and they wore these sparkly suits. They had a bunch of big hits, and they even had their own TV show on Saturday afternoons. They gave Loretta Lynn her start, and just like Dolly Parton came to be known as “that girl on The Porter Wagoner Show,” Loretta Lynn came to be known on The Wilburn Brothers Show. There are a few actors from Arkansas like me, Alan Ladd, and Dick Powell, but if you boiled it down, of all the famous people from Arkansas, most of them came from country music. Guys like Jim Ed Brown and the Wilburns.

  Everywhere Tom and I ever went, from New York to Mexico, San Diego, L.A., all those places, we never went anywhere we knew anybody or had any money. We didn’t do anything right, ever. We made plans to go to Nashville, get a cheap-ass hotel room, and just start walking up and down Music Row, going into places and announcing, “Hey! We’re songwriters!” It’s like, “Really? You came to Nashville to be songwriters? What an interesting idea, we never heard of that shit before.”

  We had a bunch of songs we planned to bring with us—songs like “Crop Dusting Man.” We were trying to make one of those novelty songs kind of like Jim Stafford or someone would do. There was a song by Terry Fell called “Truck Driving Man,” and we thought, What if we just took some stupid-ass profession and did “Something Man”—“Plumbing Man” or whatever? We decided on “Crop Dusting Man.” We thought it was funny anyway.

  When I told my mom that we were going to Nashville, she said, “You should look up the Wilburns.” My mother knew the Wilburns from when they would come to Alpine as little kids. They would play at the Presbyterian church, which was right across the road from my grandmother’s house, and they even sort of used my grandmother’s house as a dressing room. My mom had a crush on Teddy Wilburn when he was, like, twelve and she was maybe ten. So there was a connection in Nashville—a loose one, but stronger than we had any other place we went.

  We arrived in Nashville and went to have lunch at a place called the Merchant’s Café, which I think is still there. We were in there and we saw a stocky guy, built like Raymond Burr. He had a lot of hair and glasses. We thought he was an old man at the time, but he was probably fifteen years younger than I am now. He looked like a novelist type, and you could tell he was writing a book. He had all his shit spread out all over the table. He would write a little bit, run his fingers through his hair, then write some more. I’ll never forget the image of his baseball mitt–looking hands, fingers running through his greasy hair, flopping it back, shaking his head. This guy was sitting there looking angry, like he wanted to shoot himself, and it’s like, goddamn. We had just gotten there to be writers, and here’s the first guy we see in the Merchant’s Café and he looks like he’s going to hang himself tonight.

  We finished up our lunch and went to look for the Wilburns’ publishing company, Surefire Music. We found it over on Music Row West. We walked in, and their secretary was sitting there. I said, “Hey! We’re here to be songwriters, and my mom used to know Teddy Wilburn. They used to change clothes at my grandmother’s house.”

  She wasn’t really paying attention, and I thought she was going to give us the bum’s rush, but she said, “Teddy and Doyle, they’re not here. You say you know them?” I said, “Yes, ma’am, yes, ma’am.” She said, “Well, Doyle will be back here in a little while.”

  When we learned Doyle Wilburn wasn’t going to be in until after lunch, Tom and I went walking down the street, and Tom said, “Let’s get a hooker.” Tom and I, we were never into hookers. Me, I always loved women, but I never looked at hookers and strippers as people I would hook up with. No judgment, it’s just I was too nervous about it. I couldn’t really even go into strip joints. I’ve been to a handful of strip joints in my lifetime, but I just don’t know where to look—their eyes, their breasts, below their waists, I just don’t know. They’re sad places for me. I never got into them. But there was a time when Tom and I wanted to try out what it was like to get a hooker.

  First try at it, I think, might have been in Nashville. It could have been in Dallas, but both attempts took place pretty close together. We walked over to a place that somebody may have told us about, I don’t remember, but it was a brick building in a decent neighborhood by Music Row. It looked like a dentist’s office, and it had a plaque in brass or something on the door that said ATHLETIC CLUB.

  We looked at each other like, Huh. That’s supposed to be the deal. So we knocked on the door, and a woman, who was obviously a hooker, opened the door. We stood looking at her for a few seconds, and Tom whispered, “Ask her … say something,” because my buddy Tom, he never talks. He doesn’t talk to anybody. So I had to do the talking. “Uh, yeah, we’d like to lift some weights,” I said.

  She looked at us like, The fuck? What planet did you motherfuckers come from? but just goes, “What?” I said, “Yeah, we just wanted to come in and work out on some weights.” And she said, “Who are you? Get the fuck out of here!” and just slammed the door on us.

  We walked around for a little bit, then went back to Surefire Music. I think Doyle came out in the midst of this. I said something to Doyle, and I wrote a note to Teddy. Nothing really happened then.

  Sometime in 1979, I went back to Nashville, this time by myself. And this time I thought ahead. I had written to them and even talked to Teddy on the phone. I told him the whole story about my grandmother and my mom, and he invited me to come.

  By then, I was playing in Nothin’ Doin’, which I mentioned earlier. I had written a few songs that I took with me to Teddy’s studio, where he was working on a record of Don Williams songs. He was a real slick cat, all put together with his hair gassed back and wearing fancy clothes. He was a cool guy. At that point, I’d never been in a studio that had huge walls with big speakers where you could turn the sound up to supersonic levels. He was playing this new record of Don Williams’s songs.

  Then we had a nice talk. I told him all about my band and about how I wanted to be a songwriter, and he goes, “Hey, let’s go take a ride in the limo.” I’m like, wow, we’re going to take a ride in the limo. It was an old limousine, probably from the sixties, and I thought he’d have some guy named Jeeves that was going to take us around town, but Teddy got in the driver’s seat and I walked around to the passenger’s seat. He drove me all over Nashville, telling me everything that happened in that town. He told me where Hank Williams did this over here and Ray Price did that over there, and where Hank and Audrey lived.

  Anyway, while we were out there cruising, he said, “I got the funniest feeling about you. I meet young guys, they come up here all the time, and I don’t know what it’s gonna be, but you’re going to be a well-known guy. I think there’s something different about you. You’re going to do really well one day.”

  A couple of months later, Teddy wrote me a letter on the Wilburn Brothers gold letterhead. He began the letter, “Dear Billy Bob,” and in parentheses, “(which I think you shoul
d use instead of just Billy).” He talked to me a little bit about that when I was with him. He said, “You know, people will always remember that name. Nobody will ever have to ask who you are.” I was just Billy to that point in my life. I was never called Billy Bob, because back in Arkansas you don’t call yourself that. You might as well just say Jethro Bodine. Because of Teddy Wilburn, I used my full name, and sure enough, even when I first got to L.A., there wasn’t a fucking soul among the casting directors who didn’t know who I was when I called.

  Anyway, he wrote me this letter that said, “If Surefire Music can help you out, that’d be great. We really like your songs, [blah blah blah]. Teddy Wilburn, God’s Love, ’79.” I’m Billy Bob because of Teddy Wilburn. And I still have that letter.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  “Breakin’ Down”

  Let go of the wheel, the drivin’s done

  Don’t turn around

  You showed up in the lost and found

  Welcome to our town

  Just close your eyes, you’re finally breakin’ down

  —“Breakin’ Down” (Thornton/Andrew)

  BEFORE I CAME TO CALIFORNIA, TOM EPPERSON AND I WENT TO NEW York to seek our fame and fortune. It was 1977, and we stayed ten hours. We had a tape recorder with us because we wanted to record our reaction to seeing New York City. Tom says that he still has the cassette tape and that we sound so fucking country you can’t believe it.

  I spent ten, fifteen years in California reading for parts they wouldn’t give me unless it was about a redneck. But there have been a million New Yorkers playing in movies about Mississippi, and they have that Foghorn Leghorn accent that doesn’t exist anywhere. I grew up in the South, and I never heard anybody talk like that. There are some people in Georgia and Alabama that give it a little lilt, but not that much. Anyway, it’s not like I sound like Charles Boyer now, but at least if I have to do a movie where I’m not from the South, I can do it. Back then, we were just hillbillies. I haven’t heard the tape since 1977, but Tom says you can’t imagine how country we sound. He says he and I were hyperventilating as we arrived in New York before we went into a tunnel. We were coming into town from Pennsylvania, or New Jersey probably. We came out of this tunnel, and I remember we parked not too far out on Sixth Avenue. When we saw the Statue of Liberty, we started yelling, “Jesus Christ, look at that, that’s the Statue of Liberty, and it’s green! It’s fucking green!” Tom says you can hear me breathing too hard, hyperventilating on tape. I haven’t heard this tape in thirty fucking years, you know, but on that tape is exactly what the fuck I said the first time I ever left home. I would be embarrassed to hear it now.

  “THE TOM EPPERSON STORY” BY TOM EPPERSON

  (AS TOLD TO TOM EPPERSON)

  Part IV

  I was a big fan of The Waltons and identified with John Boy, the aspiring young Southern writer. When John Boy left Walton’s Mountain and moved to New York City to seek his fame and fortune, I decided it was a sign that I should do the same. I talked Billy into coming with me. The fact that we had very little money and not a single contact in New York didn’t seem to faze us. We warned our weeping mothers and girlfriends that it would probably be years before we returned, then bought a road map and left Malvern in my packed-to-the-gills black Buick.

  It was June 1977. The Summer of Sam. We drove through the very intimidating Holland Tunnel and parked the car on the Avenue of the Americas. We began to walk. New York terrified us. The buildings seemed miles high. Wave on wave of yellow taxis rushed hither and thither down the streets. The throngs of pedestrians seemed alien, rude, and in a great hurry. The only friendly person we encountered was a chubby black woman who said to me: “Hey, baby, wanna date?” Flattered, I replied: “No, ma’am, but thanks for asking.”

  We walked and walked, and day turned into night, and a violent thunderstorm struck the city, and we were soaked to the skin, and we saw apocalyptic-looking clouds whipping past the top of the Empire State Building. We decided to return to the car, but weren’t sure where we had left it. We became lost. The rain continued. We were afraid the Son of Sam was going to get us. Finally, with the help of a kindly cabdriver, we found our car. We’d arrived in New York at noon. We left at ten o’clock that night. Shaken and humiliated, we took our time driving back to Arkansas. We hung out in a cheap motel in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, for a few days. Twelve days after we’d left, we were back in Malvern. Billy went to the Dairy Queen. He ran into his girlfriend. She was surprised. She said: “But I thought you were goin’ to New York City.”

  Youth is nothing, though, if not resilient, and after a few weeks of recuperation, we hit the road again. We boarded a Greyhound bus to Lakeside, a suburb of San Diego, to visit Billy’s aunt and uncle, Sally and Bill.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  “Pie in the Sky”

  I’m pretty sure I’m gonna come up with a plan fairly soon

  Lately at night I’ve been talkin’ it over with the man in the moon

  I’ve got this crazy feelin’ that my ship will come in

  Maybe fate will finally flip this old loser a win

  I keep throwin’ wishes

  In a well that’s almost dry

  I’m keepin’ body and soul together

  Eatin’ pie in the sky

  —“Pie in the Sky” (Thornton/Andrew)

  WE CAME BACK TO ARKANSAS WITH OUR TAILS BETWEEN OUR LEGS, and then Tom wanted to go to Hollywood to be a screenwriter. Instead, we headed to San Diego to stay with my aunt Sally and my uncle Bill because we were afraid of Hollywood. The truth is, we were always too afraid to go to L.A., so we’d go to other places first. We kinda crept into L.A.

  I’ve always maintained that you really haven’t lived until you’ve taken a cross-country trip on a bus, and that’s how we traveled to San Diego. On the way, we stopped at a bus stop in Sweetwater, Texas, and I ate this peach cobbler that looked great but—you know how real cobbler, good cobbler, has a crust on it and there’s crunchy shit? Well, this was just balls of white dough with peaches in it, in some kind of soupy sauce. I don’t know if that’s what did it or not.

  We got back on the bus, and from Sweetwater to El Paso there ain’t a fucking thing. It was night, dark as shit, and when you looked out the window of the bus, you literally couldn’t see anything. Tom and I were sitting about three-quarters of the way back, and there was this girl up front who was kind of hot. I kept telling Tom, “I’m gonna go over there and sit next to that girl.” So Tom said, “Why don’t you just go sit by her?” and I said, “I don’t know …” Truth is, I was feeling a little queasy.

  I finally went down and sat by her, and we started talking. “Hey, where you from?” and all that sort of shit. All of a sudden, my stomach started making the weirdest noises—it was real loud—and I got the shits like you can’t imagine. The kind that feels like knives are being stuck in your intestines. I broke out in a cold sweat, and I go, “Uh, yeah, I’ll be right back, I’ll talk to you in a little bit.” I got up and walked down the aisle with my ass pinched together because I was about to shit myself right in the seat. I walked all the way back down the bus toward the bathroom, which was in the back corner. Right outside the door there were two seats that were kind of smaller than the rest of the seats. Just on the outside of the bathroom, there was an old black couple, and the man looked like Tom Epperson’s dad—he was exactly Tom’s dad, only he was black.

  Anyway, when I got there, the bathroom door just kind of came open. I went in and closed the door, which had no lock on it—the latch and lock were both broken. It just had a little bitty knob that you had to hold with two fingers to keep the fucking thing shut. I pull my pants down and I’m shitting all the way down to the toilet.

  So, I’m down there, miserable, cramps, pains like you can’t imagine. I’m in there forever moaning, “Ohhhhh! Oh man!” just shitting like crazy. I’m sweating and cold, and people keep coming to the door trying to open it. I got this one little knob to hold on to and I’m screamin
g, “I’m in here!” It would open like a foot and I would have to pull it back.

  Finally, when I was done—though the pain kind of never went away—I got up, and there’s no toilet paper or paper towels left. There’s not a fucking thing in the bathroom but shit on the walls and the floor. I panicked. What am I gonna do? I pulled my pants and underwear off and wiped my ass and legs as well as I could with my underwear—which was not very thoroughly—and threw my underwear in the trash. That’s where all the paper towels were.

  I pulled my pants back up, and I went out there devastated, just fucking devastated. I was as skinny then as I am now, maybe skinnier, and right at that moment I felt like I weighed about eighty fucking pounds. So I went back out there and sat down by Tom, and I’m like, “Aw gee, I was real sick …” A truck driver was sitting behind us, and he offered us whiskey, so we drank whiskey with him.

  The next stop was Big Spring, Texas. We got off, and the girl was still wanting to talk to me. It was two o’clock in the morning, and we went into this dingy café that was gray and yellow. The girl was like, “Hey, you want to get some pie?” And I said, “I don’t know …” and I went right into the bathroom to clean myself up some more.

  Before you knew it, we were getting back on the bus, and we arrived in San Diego at sunrise. When we got there, my ass was on fire. I was like one of those baboons with the raw-looking asses, and I still smelled like shit, but when I got to my aunt’s house, I had the best shower I ever had in my life.

  WE SPENT THREE MONTHS LIVING IN MY AUNT AND UNCLE’S TOOLSHED kind of thing that had a water bed, sharing the place with this old Mexican man who was doing the tile on their pool. He had these nightmares, and Tom and I were afraid that he was like Juan Corona and that we’d wake up with a machete in our faces in the middle of the fucking night. You’d wake up and freeze your fucking ass off floating on that goddamn water bed. I woke up with a sore throat and a cold every morning listening to nightmares in Spanish.